Financial surnames

My wife worked for a time in the records office of the local hospital and came home one day with the news that a family called Curtain had named their infant daughter Annette.

And seen on a wall: -

"This is a graffito

These are graffiti"

Rod

One would hope that Mr and Mrs Cart did not name their son Orsen.

Well, there ya go - another opportunity for humour ground into the dirt by the heel of the Euro...

A harmless hobby of mine over the years has been a search for the perfect surname. I'm quite happy with my own, but it has nine legitimate spellings (so far discovered) and countless illegitimate ones. So:

• It has to be capable of announcing over the telephone without spelling it out (so Bailey, Bayly, Baillie, Bailie etc are out).
• It has to be pronounceable correctly without guidance (so Hindley and Hindley etc. are out. I had one of each in the same tutor group when I was a teacher);
• It must have no negative connotations (so Slack, Idle, Thick, Loveless etc. are out);
• It must have no sexual connotations (think of your own examples. I was at school with girls called Hoare and Toplice);
• It should have no tribal connotations (so Douglas, Preece, MacHine are out);
• It should contain no diacritic or punctuation marks (so O'Really, M'Spreader and Brontë are out);
• It should be capable of no risible connotations (I have actually come across Walter Fall, Will Barrow, Nora Way and I.C. Double, and about twenty years ago a friend showed me an entry in the register of veterinarians for a man named Everard Cock) ;
• It should raise no questioning eyebrows when first announced (so Andrewartha is out);

and so on. The stongest candidate so far is Hill, but the search continues.

George

Edited By Georgineer on 10/03/2022 14:17:39